QUANTIFIED COMMUNITYInstrumenting neighborhoods to learn how built environments affect the lives of urban citizens.

CIVIC ANALYTICSOur research and education programs are arming city agencies with the tools to put their data to work.

QUANTIFIED COMMUNITY

The QC Sensor Array

Our urban sensors have been developed to measure and track localized environmental conditions at high spatial and temporal resolution. These non-invasive, adaptable, and reliable devices provide critical baseline quality-of-life indicator data designed to help communities, urban planners, and urban scientists make better decisions and build our understanding of urban dynamics.

The Quantified Community

Launched by Prof. Kontokosta in 2012, the Quantified Community (QC) – a long-term neighborhood informatics research initiative – is a network of instrumented urban neighborhoods where we collect, measure, and analyze data on physical and environmental conditions and human behavior to advance our fundamental understanding of urban systems dynamics. This provides a deep resource for examining how neighborhoods and the built environment affect individual and social well-being, resource consumption, and resilience.

The Quantified Community has been launched in three very distinct neighborhoods in New York City: at Hudson Yards, an under-construction “city-within-a-city” of 28 million square feet in Manhattan; in Lower Manhattan, a mixed-use neighborhood that attracts residents, workers, and visitors; and in Red Hook, Brooklyn, an economically-distressed community facing significant development and demographic changes. Additional neighborhoods, through Dr. Kontokosta’s partnership in the New York City Neighborhood Innovation Lab initiative, will be added over time.

The QC seeks to utilize data science and sensing technologies to understand urban systems dynamics in service of the collective needs and shared challenges facing residents of urban communities. Therefore, knowing what data to collect – and why – must be driven by community needs and participatory processes that engage these residents in problem definition. Through the QC project, the participating neighborhoods are intended to yield a rich, long-term source of research activity, where longitudinal studies of health impacts, behavior change, and policy interventions can be conducted to understand the interaction of physical, environmental, and human systems in rich detail.

Recent News

December 28, 2018

National Academies to host Frontiers of Big Data for Urban Sustainability Workshop in January

Prof. Kontokosta to speak on large-scale urban spatial-temporal data.

October 31, 2018

Prof. Kontokosta’s Quantified Community research in Urban Land Magazine

QC @ Hudson Yards

A city-within-a-city, Hudson Yards is one of the largest private real estate developments in history. Through a unique partnership with the Related Companies, we are working together to build an “informatics infrastructure” into the buildings and public spaces through Hudson Yards. We are bringing Big Data to city building to better understand, model, and predict how the built environment impacts the social, environmental, and economic fabric of a global city.

QC @ Red Hook

Our partner in the Red Hook QC project is the Red Hook Initiative, a community organization whose mission is to drive social change through the empowerment of young people. We are working together to utilize urban IoT technologies to measure key environmental health indicators and provide information back to residents to both find sources of problems and develop better solutions. Engaging the community is a critical aspect of our work.

QC @ Lower Manhattan

Working with the Alliance for Downtown New York, we are leveraging the technology infrastructure of Lower Manhattan to deploy the QC Sensor Array and better understand urban mobility in a dense, mixed-use urban environment.

NYC Neighborhood Innovation Labs

New York City will create a series of neighborhood innovation labs across the five boroughs. The new labs will accelerate the testing and deployment of new Smart City technologies. Developed by the City’s Chief Technology Officer, the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation, the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), and New York City Economic Development Corporation, the neighborhood innovation labs will build on the CUSP Quantified Community research facility and the Mayor’s efforts to expand free public Wi-Fi networks across the city, leveraging this connectivity and the Internet of Things to help improve day-to-day life for community residents and small businesses.